Bill Pierson and his wife, Mary Ellen, had never set foot in Blacksburg before arriving from Purdue University in the summer of 1980. She was pregnant with their first child. He had just been accepted into a veterinary school that did not yet physically exist.

They turned off the highway, drove past campus, and saw an orange-and-maroon sign: “Future site of the College of Veterinary Medicine.” Behind it, four concrete pillars stood in a swampy field.

“We both just looked at each other,” Pierson said. “Oh my word. What have we done? We just bought swamp land in Florida.”

They stayed. Four decades later, the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine has named Pierson the recipient of its 2025 Lifetime Achievement Alumni Award in recognition of a career that spans the college’s entire history — from its charter class through decades of research, teaching, and institutional leadership.

Pierson, who retired in 2018 as professor emeritus of biosecurity and infection control, still returns to teach avian health at the college.

The charter class

Pierson arrived among 64 students. The class had no alumni to ask for advice, no yearbooks to study, and no proof that the curriculum would hold up for the national board exams. The class lost two students along the way. The remaining 62 graduated together in 1984.

“Nobody knows that this worked,” Pierson said of the feeling before the boards. “And so I guess we’ll find out.” 

What held the class together, he said, was the uncertainty that could have pulled it apart. The class was half the size of today’s. The faculty was still finding its footing. Students and professors built something together — and they knew it.

“That newness, the new faculty, the newness of the curriculum, the uncertainty, actually helped form the joints and the glue between us,” Pierson said. “We all rooted for each other. Everybody wanted everyone else to succeed.”

The charter class produced two future directors of the college’s Veterinary Teaching Hospital: Pierson and his classmate Terry Swecker.

An itch that wouldn’t go away

After graduating, Pierson took a job at a small animal practice in Pennsylvania, between Lancaster and Dauphin counties. He saw anything that could fit through the door and the occasional horse in the parking lot. 

Because he was one of the few veterinarians in the area willing to see avian patients, word spread. The caseload grew. A second practice opened. Other associates came and went because the schedule was grueling — two rapidly growing practices and two veterinarians seeing all of their own emergencies.

“I loved what I was doing,” Pierson said. “But I saw it also as something that was unsustainable.” 

There was something else. In his first year of veterinary school, the dean, Dick Talbot, had asked students to write down where they saw themselves after graduation. Pierson wrote that he thought he might enjoy research and instruction. As school progressed, his interests expanded. He spent years in clinical practice before the prediction on that card began to pull him back.

“There was part of me that I still hadn’t completely explored,” Pierson said, “and that’s what brought me back, plus a little nudging from a friend.”

Pierson returned to Blacksburg to pursue a Ph.D. in infectious diseases, which he completed in 1993. His research focused on hemorrhagic enteritis in turkeys — a viral disease that could kill up to 60 percent of a flock and leave the survivors with immune suppression.

The work placed him in a corner of the poultry industry that attracted little outside funding. Virginia’s turkey producers were part of one of the largest regional production areas in the country, but the big research dollars flowed to broiler chickens.

An early vaccine for the disease had been developed at Virginia Tech by his advisor, Charles Domermuth, and colleagues. Continued interest by the turkey industry helped sustain the research program and gave Pierson a springboard into the faculty career he had written about on that card years earlier.

From flock health to hospital health

Pierson joined the veterinary college faculty in 1991 and built a career that moved across boundaries.  

His early work with infectious diseases and biosecurity in poultry led to infection control and prevention for broader populations, first in the Veterinary Teaching Hospital, then to counterterrorism and emergency preparedness. He collaborated with colleagues at other universities to develop related training materials for Virginia, the Department of Homeland Security, USDA, and FBI.

The same expertise in population-level disease that kept Virginia’s turkey flocks alive was, in another context, preparing state and federal stakeholders to manage bigger challenges.

The work extended internationally. Through a partnership with other U.S. universities, Mongolia V.E.T. Net, the Swiss Agency for Development and Corporation and the Mongolian Ministry of Food and Agriculture, Pierson helped develop a master’s degree program in veterinary science at the Mongolian State University of Agriculture.

In 2007, Gerhardt Schurig, the veterinary college’s dean, asked Pierson to serve as director of the Veterinary Teaching Hospital, a role he held until 2014. Running the hospital, he said, drew on many of the same skills he had developed in the poultry barns.

“I used to tease people, but I would tell them, it’s all flock health,” Pierson said. “Whether it’s chickens and turkeys, or whether it’s faculty, staff, and students, it was flock health. It was about trying to keep the hospital population healthy.”

A mentor who let them wander

During his career, Pierson advised or served on committees for dozens of graduate students. His approach to mentoring came from his own advisor.

“Charlie Domermuth, who was a great advisor for me, allowed me to find myself,” Pierson said. “He just said, here’s the problem. I’m not going to tell you how to fix it. I’m going to let you figure that out.”

Pierson adopted the same philosophy. He set one condition: every project had to connect to the real world.

“You have to show me where this rubber meets the road,” Pierson said. “You have to build me a hammer to hit something.” 

One of his last graduate students was Jessica Walters, now program manager in the Office of Laboratory Services with the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services and herself a recipient of the college’s 2025 Outstanding Recent Alumni Award. 

Walters wanted to be a poultry field veterinarian. Pierson insisted that half of her dissertation be conducted in the laboratory.

“She said, I hate this part,” Pierson recalled. “It’s like, yeah, well, this is what we’re going to do.”

Today, Walters manages the state’s laboratory services — a role that draws on both the clinical instincts she brought to her graduate work and the laboratory discipline Pierson pushed her to develop.

Pierson retired in 2018 and was conferred the title of professor emeritus by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors. He moved to Durham, North Carolina, with Mary Ellen but keeps coming back to Blacksburg.

He still teaches poultry health at the college, standing in the same classrooms he has walked through for decades, asking questions, waiting for answers, nurturing students in the clinical problem-solving skills he believes matter more than any textbook.

“I like hearing the crackle of neurons and the light bulbs, seeing the light bulbs go on in their faces,” Pierson said. “That, for me, is the chief reward.”

He tells his students not to obsess over the material. Sit down with the notes and a good glass of wine, beer, or beverage of choice he advises. What matters is learning to think through a problem and learning how to use your resources effectively because there will always be a case that walks in the door and sends you to the library.

Information matters, but “how you think your way through problems,” Pierson said. “That’s the focus of my instruction.”

It is an approach rooted in values as much as method. In 2015, the college awarded Pierson the Virginia M. and Edward E. Thompson Award, which recognizes a faculty member whose life embodies the high standards of professionalism and humanitarian values of its namesake. When he retired three years later and was asked whether he wanted the traditional lamp or rocking chair, he asked instead for the Thompson Award citation on a plaque.

“If you read the Formal Resolution articulated in the Virginia M. and Edward E. Thompson Award it states that it is to awarded to a faculty member 'in recognition of that individual's humanitarian values, professional standards, and commitment to excellence in teaching, research and public service,’ “ Pierson said. “I think this statement embodies what I had always hoped would be the epitaph of my career.”

When the dean called to tell him about the Lifetime Achievement Alumni Award, the conversation started in a way that made Pierson’s stomach drop.

“When you’re hitting 70, and the dean begins the phone call with ‘Bill, I have the unfortunate task of telling you,’ ” Pierson said, “I was thinking one of my colleagues had passed.”

Nobody had died. It was just the award. And not just any recognition, but one from the school he helped build as a first-year student more than 40 years ago — the school he kept coming back to, the school that, even in retirement, he still cannot quite leave.

“The fact that former classmates and students, all now colleagues, would think to honor me with a Lifetime Achievement Award is truly a capstone beyond my imagining” Pierson said. “I am so grateful to have had such wonderful students, colleagues, friends, and a supportive family throughout it all. What more could a person honestly wish for?”

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